dimanche 9 avril 2017

Ex-UK ambassador to Syria: Assad is not the author of chemical attacks

Interview of Peter Ford by Sky News on April 5, 2017

Transcript:

“Ask who benefits – clearly it’s not the
Syrian regime or the Russians who are benefitting. And I believe it’s highly
unlikely that either were behind what’s happened. There are different
possibilities. One is that all of it is fake news: the images, the videos, the
information all come from opposition sources and not from any credible
independent journalists.

It’s also possible
that the pictures show the aftermath of a bombing attack which happened to hit
a jihadi chemical weapons munition dump. We know for a fact that the jihadi’s
were storing chemical weapons in schools in Eastern Aleppo because these were
seen later by western journalists. This is one distinct possibility. […]

We never learn, do we?
Iraq’s chemical weapons – remember that one? We were stampeded. Aleppo, we were
told that there was a holocaust going on – massacres – didn’t happen.
Independent reporters went in afterwards and saw no evidence of massacres. What
we did see were fighters being bussed out quietly. And we discovered
subsequently that a lot of the footage was fake.”

“Well, it’s not profitable to discuss the
what-might-have-been – personally, I think it was correct in 2013 not to
intervene on the side of the jihadis. Maybe I’m wrong, but I suspect that most
of the people, when they thought about it for a second, would ask themselves:
well, what’s going to replace Assad and the secular regime which is protecting
minorities, Christians, women’s rights? I don’t think the Islamists would have
been a better bet, and that is even more the case today. Remember that in Idlib
where this happened is a rats’ nest of the most extreme jihadis.

Dogs
returning to their own vomit. They made all these mistakes: Iraq, Libya – they
never learn and they would like to reproduce the same scenario in Syria.
Fortunately, the Trump administration moved only last week – and this may be
significant here – moved only last week to disown the Obama policy of trying to
unseat the Syrian regime. Trump’s people said: we’re more interested in
unseating ISIS – that’s our priority. And you may think it’s significant that
this attack comes days after that. Now if the jihadis wanted to complicate
Trump’s task of making America’s policy more sensible, they wouldn’t have gone
about it any other way than trying to mount a piece of fake news like this.”